I have recently worked on several projects that have been built to utilize the Microsoft cloud platform called Azure. Azure offers a lot of really interesting benefits, and especially when it comes to being elastic. You can basically throw however much data you want at it, and as long as you are willing to pay for it, it will handle it. It doesn’t matter if you throw data at it that needs to be computed, or if you throw vast amounts of data that needs to be stored. Azure will handle it for you.
On top of that, it is really easy to build for. There isn’t really a whole lot to learn before one can get up and running in the cloud. Microsoft even offers a sweet SDK that gives you access to the cloud based services locally on your machine. It offers you the ability to deploy your webroles (web applications) straight to a local “cloud” and debug it. So you don’t even need to have an Azure account to starting to work with it.
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